


find my soul as i go home

by hitlikehammers



Series: wait for me [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: And He's Reached His Upward-Limit for Heartbreak in One Lifetime Damnit, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Wanda Maximoff, Codependency, Cryostasis, Forgiveness, In Fact The Entire Wakandan Royal Family is Better Than You, Letters, Longing, M/M, Magic and Science and Poorly-Acronym'd Neural Frameworks—Oh My!, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Regret, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers is Only a Man, Supersoldiers in Love, T'Challa is Better Than You, Team as Family, Teamwork, Tony Stark Has A Heart, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-24 15:43:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7514005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Thoughts trickle in like rainwater: harsh. Swift. Reverberating.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>The first are what they were always going to be. Bucky. Just Bucky.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>But the people around him are strangers, the voice beside him are ghosts. Too much time has passed.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>And Steve was foolish, to think he could escape what it meant to know loss.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Steve comes off the ice. And while they'd hinted at it, he'd never thought fixing things could have taken this long: years. Generations. It couldn't <i>possibly</i> take <i>that</i> long.</p><p>Could it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	find my soul as i go home

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little more ANGST, but now with a side-sprinkling of hope and love and light and joy. Because _I_ am writing this. You knew that was inevitable, don't lie. 
> 
> Title credit [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-zs1n-4S0A). 
> 
> As ever: love to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad/) <3

Thoughts trickle in like rainwater: harsh. Swift. Reverberating.

The first are what they were always going to be. Bucky.

Just Bucky.

Steve was shaking for the trail of Bucky’s warm mouth over his bare skin that one night, that last night before as Bucky’d waited until Steve’s heart stopped racing after they both came hard and fast for the second, the seventh, the hundredth time: it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter, because it was all borrowed time. It didn’t matter because Steve would never be lost enough to the pleasure of it, the love in it, to stand to hear what Bucky tried to say every goddam _time_.

“You gotta, Stevie.”

Steve huffed, heart tripping under Bucky’s lips on his chest in rage, in needing, in denying; in breaking. 

“Don’t gotta do nothin’, Buck,” Steve rasped out, breathless; he couldn’t think on morning, let alone after. He couldn’t bear to think on _losing_ , god forbid consider moving past it one more time.

So many times too _much_.

“Because I’m selfish,” Bucky kissed at Steve’s chest as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “I need you happy.” 

And Steve just shook his head. Steve just shook his head and let his tears fall, because god. _God_.

“You’re my heart, Steve,” Bucky breathed against Steve’s, kissing the feeble beat. “I need my _heart_ to be happy.”

Steve’s hand had gone to the back of Bucky’s head, pressing those lips closer, deeper to Steve’s straining, pounding heart as he whispered, hoarse:

“It _can’t_ be, without _you_.”

“Try,” Bucky’d exhaled, and it was cool suddenly; Steve suddenly realized Bucky’d been crying against him as Steve’d been crying himself, just as soft and bitter. “Stevie. Promise me that you’ll _try_.”

Steve’s throat burns as he moans, and pulls away from the memory—reluctant to leave the echo of Bucky’s body against his but needing to run from it, no more than a memory.

There’s a weight on his brow, on his forehead: warm. Broad. Gentle.

He leans toward it, but thinks he fails. He can’t move, really. Not in any way that matters.

“Stupid fucking punk,” a voice that feels like summer breezes and lifeblood comes from far away. “Shoulda known.”

Steve hurts, aches around another moan: he can’t place this thought, this memory. 

He can’t bear to keep _hurting_ , that was why he chose the ice at Bucky’s side, he—

“Shh,” the voice swims through ether, underwater and Steve wonders what’s being shushed until he feels the pain in his chest centered around his heart as it moves beyond any wrangling; he wonders, idly, if the sound of its rampage can be heard aloud. 

_Shh_ , he tries to tell it with his lips; with his mind; useless. 

“Shh. Sleep, baby.” 

And the weight changes. It’s softer, but closer. Steve feels it in his chest above the banging: more important. More essential to his being.

“I need my heart to be happy,” the voice is made of shapes against his brow; the voice is the weight, there, somehow. 

“I _need_ my _heart_ , yeah?”

And Steve moans again, but only because the weight lifts from his forehead and settles formless in his ribs, and the words are further away, now, and Steve doesn’t like that, Steve doesn’t want that—

“Sleep.”

Thought recedes once more. 

Steve slips away again, into the dark.

_________________________________

 

When Steve comes to next, his eyes obey him in opening. They don’t focus quite right, but it’s enough.

The surge of adrenaline in him is almost enough to knock him straight out again.

“Be at ease, Captain,” a voice comes from his side: close.

Not the one he remembers through the water, far away.

“Breathe deeply,” the kind, but unknown face beside him instructs, and Steve tries to comply; trusts innately beyond his knowing, beyond his mind’s ability to grasp just now.

“It is more time consuming, this way,” the man next to him explains softly, miming carefully the depth of the breaths he wishes Steve to take at his urging; Steve gets closer with each inhale, but never quite aligns.

“Without the chemicals to hasten, without the harm done, and the pain,” the man frowns slightly, and Steve notices he’s quite young—stately, mature, but much younger than Steve himself.

“But there _is_ time,” the youth next to him says, encouraging, his features softening again.

Steve swallows once, twice, many times before words get formed enough for sound.

“Who are you?”

The young man smiles softly, and Steve...knows. 

Steve knows that expression. Recognises it.

Just not on this face.

“My name is K'Shamba,” is the answer, and Steve doesn't recognise the name either. “Crown Prince of Wakanda.”

Steve feels himself still. Feels his heart jump and start to slam at the cage of his ribs: because that part.

That part, he knows. And that part brings another face to mind. Another name. 

The same…

The same smile, though, which means...

“I mean you no harm, Captain,” K’Shamba says, eyes wide as they pass from Steve’s face to somewhere next to him, above him—a monitor, Steve realizes, as the sound of beeping enters his field of perception and grows quick, grows shrill.

“Crown,” Steve forces out; “ _Prince_?”

K’Shamba doesn’t respond, just frowns and tries, Steve recognizes, to make himself look as little of a threat as possible. He doesn’t understand that Steve doesn’t fear him; Steve fears what his presence _means_.

“Where,” he tries to say, tries to find words for his terror, for the possibilities running through his head: “how—”

 _Where is T’Challa? How is he not here, how are you here, how long did it take, he said his descendants, perhaps even theirs but I never thought, I never dreamed, it can’t, it can’t have taken a lifetime and more, it can’t all be gone, I can’t have lost everyone again_— 

“Calm, Captain, please—” 

K’Shamba tries, pleads with him, but Steve can’t see, can’t breathe, and there’s a drum inside him that makes a shrieking, mechanical sound without: he can’t, he _can’t_ —

“What happened, what happened, where, please—” Steve gasps, but his vision is starting to grow white at the edges, and his heart is hurting for more than emotion with its torrent, and he feels himself start to choke on air and spiral beyond recovery, a single note following him back down as K’Shamba cries out:

“M’Tolla, come quickly!”

And then, for all of the riot inside and around: suddenly, there’s nothing.

_________________________________

“I know you are awake.”

Steve keeps his eyes closed of his own volition, this time. He remembers K’Shamba. Remembers what his broken heart cost so many people. Remembers how long he’s tried to hide from the inevitable truth of his being: loss.

Bucky is nowhere. Bucky is gone from him. They’d wake Bucky first, surely, and Bucky isn’t, hasn’t—

The voice that calls out to him now would have been dead many years, he suspects. Whether he’s awake or not, this isn’t real.

“I’m not awake,” he says dryly, because he can feel the dream of Wanda’s presence awaiting some reply.

He aches at the snort with which she meets his words.

“Suit yourself.”

Steve focuses on his heartbeat: inward. An old practice that he thinks he can remember: slow. Slow. Slow.

Slow.

“Was he always such a wordsmith?”

Steve doesn’t understand what she means, when she asks. Who she’s referring to; what purpose any of it serves.

What purpose anything serves, at all.

“Your,” she starts, presumably sensing his confusion: she would have, of course, if any of this were real. But she knows, because she’s a product of Steve’s mind. How could she not.

“We have a word for it in Sokovian,” she explains, and the use of the present tense allows Steve the illusion, the space in which to pretend; “Like,” and he can imagine the look on her face, the play of translating meaning in the shape of her mouth before she says: “Heart-mate.”

Steve breathes in deep, and fast, and it hurts.

“Heart-mate,” he repeats: a question that isn’t quite a question. He’s not sure what it is.

“Soulmates are chosen by the stars, by fate,” Wanda’s voice laughs sardonically. “ _Shakespeare_.”

Her endearingly vehement distaste reminds him of better times not for their quality, but for the fact of them, in the flesh: her presence here, in his head, makes him think she must have been in Wakanda while he slept, while he hid and kept as close to his frozen heart as he possibly could—she must have come. Perhaps she stayed.

He misses her, and he wonders if that’s why she visits him in half-waking dreams, now.

“Heart-mates,” she picks up in lieu of any response from Steve, “beat in time with one another. They create time, hold it in their bones. They are of shared flesh, of god’s blood,” her tone shifts as she breathes: “Pure _love_.”

Steve feels tears sneak from his closed lashes. Tries to remind himself these are only thoughts. This is not reality. Lifetimes have passed since he breathed air. Wanda is dust. Bucky is nowhere, Bucky is not _here_ —

It doesn’t help. 

“So I ask,” Wanda says again, more forceful; Steve can hear her closer, can hear the sound of her body as it shifts; “was _yours_ always such a wordsmith?”

“I don’t understand,” Steve manages, but only just.

“You don’t have to,” Wanda says, almost brightly, full of snark; “ _You’re_ not awake, after all.”

Steve swallows. He was never a coward.

He repeats that to himself as many times as it takes to make the words come out:

“How long?”

He can hear the frown in Wanda’s voice as she begs clarification:

“How _long_?”

And the real Wanda would have seen it in his head, his fear; this Wanda in his mind is giving him only the punishment, the extra added sting he deserves as he thinks about decades, centuries maybe under ice, dead to a world he was growing to care for fiercely, slow but sure, traded for the _love_ he’d never let go of, much as it always got _lost_ and it was all futile, apparently: because T’Challa’s son, the son of his son, of his son, of _his_ son stands to inherit a nation and still attended Steve’s side—Steve’s selfish bid for help in believing himself worthy of joy had cost a country time and thought, resources and care for god knows how long and everyone living that Steve had known would once more be gone from him: he had to know exactly _how much_ his selfishness had cost so many.

Too many.

“How long has it been?” he manages to form the question clearly before stumbling again, edging just that little bit too close to hysterics and squeezing his eyes closed tighter, ever tighter: “How long did I, how long have you been…”

“Oh,” Wanda murmurs, her sweet, gentle, so-much-bigger-than-she-knows heart in that single word as Steve starts to tremble, starts to sob as quiet as he can, never opening his eyes.

“Oh, Steve.” He feels her thumbs wipe his tears, and her lips against the crown of his head as she strokes his hair.

“Rest,” she bids him; “You will wake soon enough.”

And if he’s beyond giving anything to her, save love and grief to her memory, then he can listen to her instructions, in this.

He sleeps.

_________________________________

“No one would believe you were military, lying around like this, fucking lazybones.” 

Steve groans. It doesn’t hurt the same way he remembers it did, the first time.

When the first time was, however—how long it’s been—is beyond him.

“Come on, Capsicle, up an’ at ‘em.” Steve feels a light smack to his knees.

“God, that’s so fucking apt, now. It almost feels like a cop-out,” the voice grumbles, more to itself, but then, Steve starts to recognize that it kind of always sounds like that; Steve starts to recognize that he _recognizes_ the voice. 

“Too obvious. Gonna have to get more creative with my enviable talent at nicknaming.” 

“Tony?” Steve blinks his eyes open, and meets with an all-too-familiar quirk of an eyebrow aimed in his direction.

“Who the hell else?” Tony shoots back. “You know a lot of stunning brunet geniuses with my impeccable facial hair?”

Steve blinks again. Last he’d seen Tony was on the ground, shield tossed at his feet, bleeding. Screaming truths Steve couldn’t bear to hear, but ones he’d take if Bucky was leaving that hellhole beside him.

“What are you doing here?”

It makes sense, yeah, to conjure the image of this unresolved conflict, this broken friendship that was never patched, save for that piss-poor letter wrapped around a burner phone—it makes sense, but then, it doesn’t make any sense. Steve knows that bridge was burned. Steve doesn’t need to feel bad about it, now: doesn’t need Tony here or gone for him to have been someone lost to Steve nonetheless.

“Funny way to greet a guy who’s legitimately devoted his _entire life’s resources_ to helping you get your Bucky Bear back,” Tony scoffs at him; “particularly considering my personal feelings about said Bucky Bear.”

Steve’s heart stops, at those words; as what he thinks they’re saying sinks in. As what he thinks they’re saying, and the impossibility of _what he thinks they’re saying_.

“You,” Steve starts, mouth so fucking dry, heart so fucking loud. “Your,” he shakes his head, and swallows acid.

“Your entire _life_?”

“What can I say?” Tony shrugs, tosses his head a little. “Freezerburn writes one hell of a letter.”

Steve is...lost.

Steve should probably be used to that as his default mode of being, as the automatic setting for his world—Steve should probably be accustomed to that, by now. 

And yet.

“Letter?” he grabs onto that for purchase while he gathers the rest of his thoughts—Wanda had mentioned words, wordsmith, words, and Bucky had written Steve a letter, yes, a breathtaking, heartbreaking, hellish letter that curled at the edges to cut into Steve’s blood and bones, and T’Challa, oh—T’Challa, dead and gone after however many years it’s been, but he’d said there had been many letters and, and—

“Tony,” Steve gasps; “Tony, when,” he trips, shakes his head, closes his eyes because seeing doesn’t mean a damn thing when the ghosts of generations are haunting you for the decision you made to save the heart in you that was already half-dead.

“Your whole _life_?” Steve rasps, uncomprehending; “God, _god_ —” he breathes, but it’s too deep, it _hurts_ and he still doesn’t get any air. 

“When did we lose you?” Steve asks, begs: desperate. “When did you, how many _years_ —”

“Cap,” Tony pushes in, voice firm but tone wary. “Gonna be dead honest right now, you’re wigging me out a little.”

“Tony,” Steve scrambles, sits up and fights the wave of vertigo, the swell of nausea. “Tony, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. And he,” Steve’s voice cracks, because the _lack_ Of Bucky is suddenly so stark, suddenly so clear and he doesn’t know what to do with it, and he’s not strong enough to ask, to see what happened, what broke them apart and pulled them to pieces one last time, one time too many, he—

“He was sorry too, I swear, I _swear_ ,” Steve babbles, earnest as anything, desperate for it all to be known. “He never would have, if he’d—”

 

“If he’d known, if he’d had,” Tony bites his lip, considers, and carries on almost at rote, like he’s quoting a long-assimilated text, repetition having beaten it into the slip of his tongue. 

“If he'd had any concept of what he was doing, and control over his own body to move or to think or to be,” Tony pauses, hands speaking for a second in silence as he seems to sort out a remembered script before carrying on:

“Any sense of how to breathe deeper than protocol demanded, how to move slower,” Tony recites, eyes closed as he focuses, hands moving like he’s conducting a composition in time as he ticks off the words; “If his soul had been his own, if it’d been in his body instead of wherever they’d kept it locked up and on ice, made sure it never left those godforsaken cryo-tubes, if he’d been there,” Tony’s eyes snap open.

“He’d have grabbed my father by his shoulders and hugged the fuck out of him, and probably slapped him hard enough to bruise for that bullshit in Milan.” 

And Steve just stares. Because he remember Milan. He remembers, but that’s all it is.

A memory. No one who wasn’t there would ever, could ever...

“How,” Steve breathes; “how did you know…”

“Cap,” Tony starts, still at sea before he stops, freezes entirely as his eyes grow wide and he breathes, forced out from the center of his chest: “ _Shit_.”

Steve just looks at him, takes him in, and tries to figure out what the fuck anything is, what the hell anything means: what he’s meant to _do_.

“Shit, she thought you were just out of it, still,” Tony says, starting to pace.

“She?” Steve asks, barely daring to wonder what connection Tony’s referencing, where he’s going. What it might imply.

“Jazz Hands,” Tony lifts his palms and flicks his fingers out: in his crude way, Tony reads Wanda in the gesture. “She said you weren’t sure she was real.” 

And suddenly Tony, all un-pent-up energy that he is, stops cold.

“Wait.”

He turns slowly to Steve, and stares him down hard.

“You thought I _died_ figuring out how to fix your boyfriend’s brain?” he asks, incredulous. “ _Seriously_?” 

Steve swallows around the heart in his throat because Tony is… Tony is making it seem like…

Like maybe Tony _didn’t_ die. And, and _more_ , maybe _Bucky_ is—

“You thought it’d take _me_ that long?” Tony nearly squawks, clearly too offended for a normal tenor of voice. “Fuck, I knew you were pissed at me, but Jesus, Rogers.” Tony shakes his head back and forth, back and forth before he lifts betrayed eyes to Steve’s:

“No faith in my _work_?”

Steve doesn’t even know what to fucking _say_ to that. Last time they’d spoken, he’d told Steve he was unworthy of the shield. And Steve had admitted it openly, had let that piece of himself fall clean and bleed free, and tossed the damn thing back.

And now they’re, it’s—

It’s so close to what it _used_ to be, it’s almost sickening. It almost makes Steve physically ill to try and parse what it means.

What it _could_ mean.

“Fine,” Tony admits with a sigh after Steve’s quiet too long for his liking, which may or may not be very long at all. “I couldn’t have done it without the tech here, _would_ have taken my whole life, probably, and yes, _they_ would have figured it out anyway, without me, humble pie, yadda yadda, would have managed it without Maximoff, too, more than likely, but you know.” Tony’s face scrunches, sours around the word to come like a lemon as he struggles to admit:

“ _Teamwork_.”

Steve coughs out a laugh, which turns to a choke, which turns into shaking, which turns into sobbing, and he cannot fucking _stop_.

“Steve,” Tony says, drawings closer. “Steve? C’mon man, breathe, yeah? It’s okay, now.” Tony’s expression hardens, but he says softly: “ _He’s_ okay, that’s why I’m here,” Tony grasps Steve’s shoulder. “To take you to him.”

Steve hiccoughs, and raises his swimming gaze to Tony’s own.

“Him?” Steve breathes, barely able to _hope_. “He’s, you...”

“Like I said,” Tony saves him from floundering, though Tony looks uncomfortable enough that it’s more for his own sake than for Steve’s. “Took me a while to come around to it, but like I said,” Tony smirks humorlessly: “he’s got a fuckin’ way with words.”

Steve’s breathless. It’s a common feeling, lately.

But this: this feels different.

“And, oddly enough,” Tony says, waiting in the doorway until Steve struggles to his feet, tremulous; he backpedals, and slings a hand across Steve’s shoulders, keeping him steady. “He backs it up in person, just as solid.” 

Steve shuffles them awkwardly toward the threshold before Tony amends his comment: “Doesn’t mean that I _like_ him, necessarily, but,” he shrugs, and Steve feels it from the contact of Tony’s arm.

“My line of work? What does _like_ even mean, anyway?”

And Steve laughs: it’s weak, pathetic even.

But he laughs, and thinks: _maybe_.

Maybe Tony actually does feel solid. Maybe the pieces can fit together somehow...brighter.

Maybe Steve’s got enough heart still in him left to _hope_.

_________________________________

Steve’s body grows stronger, more steady with every step down hallways. Tony bears less of his weight until they just walk side by side. Steve’s body grows stronger.

His heart, his _soul_ doesn’t follow suit until he catches sight of the man lingering at the door to the labs, awaiting their arrival.

“T’Challa!” Steve calls, and the King turns, smiles at him, and Steve remembers the smile on a younger face but maybe, maybe not the _only_ face left to hold it, to frame it in this world, _maybe_.

 

“You,” Steve reaches him, and stares wonder at him. “You’re, it’s—”

“Captain.” T’Challa halts him with firm, warm hands upon his shoulders, with a steady gaze reading him deftly, seeing into him in a way Steve still can’t explain or place in words. 

“I am sorry I did not come to you, I was needed to oversee the procedure,” T’Challa glances for a moment over his shoulder, and Steve’s eyes follow: the second cryo-pod—open. Empty. Doors at the far end of the room beyond, leading elsewhere, leading maybe, _maybe_ —

“I sent my sister’s son in my stead,” T’Challa reins his attention back in, stating meaningfully: “The Crown Prince.”

“Your, your sister’s—”

“Nine months,” T’Challa answers the question that everything hinges upon, in one way or another; sees what plagues Steve’s heart and aims for its core in a single stroke. “It has been nine months, Captain. We were making steady progress, but then,”

“Then I decided that a respite south of the Equator might be nice,” Wanda, _dear_ Wanda comes up to Steve’s side and places a hand on his biceps, her eyes fiery and warm with a tinge of apology; “and that my particular gifts might help speed the process.”

“And maybe,” Tony pushes in, because he’s fucking _Tony_ , and god, _god_ he’s real; “upon reading a letter meant for her, she made the executive decision to send one my way,” Tony sighs theatrically.

“And _maybe_ I have a plane, you know, or like, twenty planes—”

“Tony—” Wanda warns.

“Alongside about seventy-five percent of an augmented neural retro-framework that seemed oddly suited to the task at hand,” Tony adds quickly, and honestly, the admission that it was _only_ three-fourths of a framework is concession enough to Wanda’s chiding. 

“Though not particularly targeted without conscious engagement, which we couldn’t really apply in this instance,” Wanda exploits the weak spot with a broad, proud grin.

“And our scientists here were able to put both of these unique talents to their best uses,” T’Challa diplomatically asserts his country’s technological superiority, and Steve is enchanted by it, Steve feels his chest start to fill with something light and warm for the first time in, in...

“I,” Wanda sobers a bit, glancing at Steve from the corner of her eye; “see fears, of course.”

“And they helped me target what she picked out,” Tony nods to T’Challa as a figurehead for, presumably, the whole of Wakandan sciences. 

“And so yeah, took a couple weeks to actually get it _done_ , but…” Tony huffs. “Nine months, as the good Mr. Monarch says.”

“That is a horrible moniker,” T’Challa shakes his head woefully, and keeps an impressively straight face at Tony’s frown. 

“I’m _trying_ , Cat-Man.”

T’Challa doesn't bother fighting a grin at that one. 

“Consider it as a birthing period,” T’Challa turns to Steve; “for we created just as much a miracle, I think.”

And Steve’s heart leaps at the suggestion: a miracle, a miracle they’ve managed between them, for the mind, for—

“Life.”

Steve’s whole body is stilled as his heart leaps in search of where that voice came from, where it comes from, and he turns based on the homing of his pounding pulse to the doorway, where Bucky— _Bucky_ , with two hands and clear eyes, is watching him with shining eyes and breathless need and Steve might have died, and this is heaven. It’s possible.

Bucky crosses the space between them intentionally, carefully: never breaks eye contact and every breath he takes forces one into Steve’s body, too—and Steve remembers weight on his brow, and a thought, a memory.

Maybe, maybe it had been more.

_I need my heart, yeah?_

Steve gasps, and Bucky reaches, and the touch of his pallm on Steve’s cheek is the entire world: is happiness, is joy, is a heart, their heart in a press of skin: pumping blood, giving—

“ _Life_ , Stevie,” Bucky breathes, close enough that Steve feels the exhalation on his lips. “They gave me, they gave _us_ , I mean, what they did,” Bucky shakes his head, marveling, and a single tear falls from his eye on the left: 

“What they, how they _fixed_ , I’m...” and now he frames Steve’s face in both hands, and Steve’s heart does stop for the touch, for the real, living _touch_ , and _nine months_ and, and—

“Stevie,” Bucky abandons Steve’s face and grabs for his hands, gathers them to his chest where his heart’s pounding hard enough, fast enough that Steve can feel it even before he presses their joined hands closer: even before Steve realizes the same tempo, same rhythm is tearing through his own veins: “ _Steve_ , babydoll.”

Steve meets Bucky’s eyes, and sees, maybe for the first time, what the future _really_ looks like as Bucky breathes, miraculous:

“We’re gonna have a _life_.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).


End file.
